Organization, Organization, Organization (When Everything Else is Falling Apart)

So earlier I mentioned that I like to keep things that remind me of my characters in one handy, easily locatable place, and that often it's decorated to the best of my (decidedly non-artistic) ability. So above are two pictures of my folder. On it are the names of the four primary characters, Dania, Sue, Carol, and Jordan. Also included are things they like: Chinese characters, quotes from Lawrence of Arabia, Owl City lyrics, flowers, a June Jordan "Poem About My Rights", dinosaur tracks, and quotes from the characters, such as: Did Carol just say a boy is C-U-T-E?!?!?!?! and We are too hot for dinosaurs! 

None of it, admittedly, makes any sense out of context, and a lot of it will never be used when I write my novel. But each phrase is something that A) reveals something about my characters, or B) Tells me something about where my story is going.

While writing my character bios, which is Step 2 of my Novel Writing Process, ideas for plots start to come to me. Since I started writing about these characters last summer, a lot of plotlines are coming back to me with minute differences, minor plotlines are starting to become major plotlines, and vague ideas in the back of my head are starting to blossom. Once I finish my last character bio, which I hope to do tonight,  I'm going to begin to organize all of these plotlines and organize scenes that  A)  reveal insight into a character's mind, and B) move the plot along.

                    

Character Bios and Preliminary Research

It is currently 7:10 pm, work just scheduled me for a bunch of hours that conflict with my internship and ruin all chances I have of a social life, and The Guy didn’t text me back for—check it—five hours because he was at a party.

Meanwhile, I am sitting here in my living room with my hair unstraightened interviewing my father on how it feels to be bald. (For the record, he was not forthcoming.)

So, in terms of novelland, what have I been doing for the last couple of days? Answer: Not a whole lot. My original goal was to do a little of something every night, but my job currently isn’t taking that idea so well. This is what happens when you have no social life, one of the girls you work with broke her clavicle, a manager is leaving, and so are two associates.

So at about the pace of an ant, for the past three days I have been drafting character bios. I have been doing this ever since I read Gail Carson Levine’s book on writing, and this habit was reinforced by my friend David LaRochelle, the author and illustrator of multiple children’s books, such as The End, The Best Pet of All (which was recently read AT THE WHITE HOUSE!), and YA novel Absolutely, Positively Not. Check him out at http://www.davidlarochelle.net/!

I plan on completing four preliminary bios on the four most prevalent characters, and later on I may write two or three more based on the boys in the novel. The working title is Ascent of Women, emphasis on the working. So far I only have two bios done, of the Main Character and her Best Friend. I plan on posting snippets of these bios once the four are complete.

Since I am behind schedule, I wanted to be done with the four bios by now, and I also wanted to have a head start on my research. Unfortunately, the internet doesn’t work well this side of the railroad, so most of my research has been centered on a set of encyclopedias that have been sitting in the living room since before I was born, one website, and a Jodi Picoult novel.

So what am I researching, you may ask? Several things. I am researching Lebanon, a Middle Eastern country that according to my old R.A. is very poor, anthropology, archaeology, paleontology, and other –ologies, and acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL).

Now my interview about baldness with my father makes a bit more sense.

In my class textbook this week, we read about how characters are static, and change, and since the best characters are very complex, sometimes what they want changes. For example: Luke wanted to defeat Darth Vader, but once he realized it was his father he wanted to destroy, he changed his mind. At the very end of the movie, he wants his father to stay alive. A character who wants a glass of water on page one may not necessarily want it on page 395.

The same goes for my main character, Dania. What she wants more than anything else in the whole wide world is to go to grad school at UCLA. However, when one of her closest friends, Carol, is given the news that her leukemia is taking the turn for the worse and that she is going to die, Dania is conflicted between going to Los Angeles to fulfill her dream and staying at her friend’s side.

Yicky Pre-Writing

As Cynthia Voigit (I think) once said, you have to hold everything about your story in until it's about to burst. I think she wrote that she holds her characters and plots for a year before she commits pen to paper.


If you're like me, the waiting kills you. 


However, we have reached a compromise, pre-writing and I. While my preferred method of writing is to sit down and start typing, sometimes that just doesn't work, and so here are some of the things I do when the plot bunnies have scurried off:

1.     1.  I chose my characters. They are recycled from a project I started but never finished from last summer. For Day 2 I am going to write out character bios, which I will publish here on this blog.

2.    2.   I decorated a folder, so I can keep all items that remind me of my characters in one safe place. I started this practice when I wrote my first novel, because it helps with organization, and when I have a moment of inspiration but I can’t remember what I named my logic character’s second cousin’s aunt, I know where I can find it. It’s also nice because when the plot bunnies leave I can riffle through pictures of clothes I could picture my MC wearing and sketches of scenes that read a lot like this:

“MC standing in front of a grimy grocery store watching a man jog w/a cigarette in mouth is he going to die?”

Now that I have the character somewhat figured out in my head, and a place to keep all of my plot bunnies, I’m going to have to devise a plot. I have a few sketchy ones left over from my project last summer, but it’s time to really sit down and see if they’re going anywhere.

No matter if they do work out or not, though, I trust my characters, and I am excited to work with them again!